Tue 05 September 2017 | -- (permalink)

Python went missing after a routine brew update. Well, sort of.

It turns out that this is just a naming ideology thing. On pretty much every platform these days, the name python is really an alias for python2, which in turn is an alias for python2.7. No doubt this is meant to wean us all off of Python 2.7 and encourage us to move on to Python 3. But there's all this existing code....

At some point or another in the last year on pretty much every platform except MacOSX, something has happened to the python alias, requiring Yet Another Package, a manual symlink, or similar kludge.

So all that really happened here is that Homebrew finally followed the other packaging systems down the rabbit hole.

Workaround is simple enough:

cd /usr/local/bin
ln -s python2 python
ln -s pydoc2 pydoc
ln -s pip2 pip